Meeting notes: August 11, 2001
We had a great turnout on Saturday, with around 30 people in attendance. Several new people came, and we had a strong showing of geocachers from the previous two meetings.
STATE PARKS ISSUES
We were honored to have Larry Blankenship of Georgia State Parks and Paul Bradshaw of Fort Yargo State Park in attendance. I believe this was a very good day for geocaching in Georgia, as these gentlemen showed themselves to be strongly interested in working with us to find ways to have geocaching listed as an approved activity.
Larry explained that there are four types or classifications of state parks
in Georgia. (My guess is that the four types are historic sites, conservation parks, recreation areas, and lodges.)
There are three areas of concern that we need to jointly address:
LOCATION - Many parks have areas that are sensitive due to historical or use designation reasons. For example, some parks have old cemeteries and burial grounds within their borders, and these areas are best avoided. In other cases, there may be rare plants or other environmentally sensitive areas. In still other cases, it is probably not appropriate to have geocachers walking through campgrounds. Larry and Paul offered that the individual park rangers could be very helpful in pointing out good cache locations as well as locations which should be avoided.
SAFETY - Caches placed near large drop-offs or other risky areas could lead geocachers into danger. Again, the local park rangers could help us make certain that we are not creating unnecessary risks for each other due to cache placement.
CONTENT - This is the area of most concern, as the content of the caches is unsupervised. While Larry and Paul recognized the positive intent of the great majority of the geocaching community, it is also possible that a mean spirited person could put almost anything into a cache container. Also, many of us were unaware that state prisoners work in the state parks; this information puts a whole new twist on thoughts of leaving anything in a cache that could be used as or converted into a weapon.
Larry offered some suggestions for our consideration. We will take these ideas forward into a specific e-mail thread for further discussion. When we have arrived at a consensus on these issues, we will respond to Larry Blankenship for his review. Once we achieve agreement with Larry, he has agreed to take our case to the director requesting approval of geocaching activity.
LOGOS
Several logo design proposals were displayed and discussed. We agreed that the upcoming week would be left open for additional proposals and
refinements. After that, we will devise a method of placing all proposals on display and put them to a membership vote.
THREADED DISCUSSION BOARDS
Lewis (Big Doggie) led a talk on the EZ Board discussion list he has created, and encouraged the membership to try it out over the next few weeks. Essentially, we have three choices at this point - using the board as-is with the pop-up and banner advertising, paying a small fee to use the board with the pop-up advertising disabled, or moving our discussions to the Groundspeak forums.
We also discussed having our own web site. Currently, Lewis has created a web site on Tripod and added content and several links. George (LoCache) will look into hosting a web site on one of his company's servers. We also voted to have George reserve the domain ggaonline.org for our use.
The "My Family" web site was also discussed briefly; however, the membership seemed to strongly favor George's suggestion that he host our own site.
EDUCATION
Andrew Knies led a talk on poisonous plants and displayed both samples and photographs. Several suggestions for prevention, and should that fail, treatment, were offered.
GEOCACHING TIPS
Donovan (bent_twigs) led a very good demonstration of compass usage in conjunction with the GPS for locating caches. In addition, he explained a method for dealing with searching in locations with poor satellite reception. Basically, this involves backing off from the poor coverage area to points where good headings can be obtained, and then triangulating the cache position.
In addition, Andrew Knies demonstrated software he uses on his laptop computer to visually show the location caches. From this, he and Julie plan their caching route for the day before setting out. For more information, please contact Andrew directly.
CUPS & SHIRTS FROM CAFEPRESS
Greg (mtn-man) brought several samples of t-shirts, mugs and mouse pads imprinted with photographs. More information can be obtained at the CafePress web site.
CONTRIBUTIONS
Contributions were made to reimburse George (LoCache) for the meeting camp site reservation and for the domain name registration.
The meeting was adjourned at 5:00 p.m. Thanks to everyone for their attendance, contributions, and attention.
